You'll have to do a kernel rebuild. Enable APM support in [kernel configuration] -> General setup -> Power Management Support. You can also try ACPI support, but as that's been labeled [EXPERIMENTAL] (albeit for a year now...blargh), I can't really tell you what that'll do.

What do you mean by autorun? Are you talking about Windows Autorun? If that's the case, there's no ebuild package for that. I remember something about an auto-mount daemon (I know Solaris has one), but that's probably just wishful thinking.

I have a Dell Latitude CP (an older laptop, if you're not familiar with Dell's line).

APM (the suspend function on the keyboard, entering "apm -s", etc) has always been one of the less solid pieces.

I have several hard drives for this machine, and one big one that has several different flavors of Linux on it. Depending on which distro and which version, sometimes it has worked faultlessly, sometimes not at all, and sometimes somewhere in between the two.

Other than the fact that it seems to be getting slowly better as time goes on, I haven't found any pattern to when it's good and when it's bad.

If I'm running X, and use the keyboard suspend function, it has been 100% reliable for me under Gentoo.

It has not been reliable without X running (which is decidedly weird). Since the keyboard thing is much more convenient most of the time than pulling up a command window and typing "apm -s", I can't really comment on how it would perform that way.

There are several options under APM in the kernel config. My only recommendation is to read the descriptions for each one, and see if anything seems to fit your symptoms.

I don't really know much at all about the guts of the process, but the impression I've gotten reading various posts on the subject is that the standard leaves a number of holes, several vendors only do a haphazard job of following the standard, and there are some pieces that require reverse engineering, which is always problematic.

The short version: it's a mess.

I just reread your post, and it sounds like your problem is even worse -- you can't do a "shutdown -h now" and have it work.

That's happened to me on a couple of distros, too. I just lived with it (and tended to avoid using those distros more than necessary.)

I'm almost certain at least one of the options for APM deals with it hanging on shutdown. Worth playing around with.